


The Good and the Bad

by Clockwork



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: AU, F/M, Family Dynamics, Roleplay, Werewolf AU, human dom, shifting is ugly, werewolf mal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-12
Updated: 2018-11-12
Packaged: 2019-08-22 21:37:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,782
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16605902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Clockwork/pseuds/Clockwork
Summary: Roleplay based werewolf AU where Eames has been recruited by Dom and Mal. Not just as a forger, but also for her pack.





	The Good and the Bad

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sionnach](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sionnach/gifts).



Mallorie had talked to Eames a lot about the need to find stability since the first day she started grooming him to become part of her pack. The one and only sole member of her pack, but pack nonetheless. Not that he hadn’t seen it in action with Mallorie and Dominick.

Not that it happened often, though Mallorie assured Eames that it was a different story when she was young and newly turned. Then she said she had been wild, caught up in her senses and her changes, and keeping her under control had been harder for her after leaving the pack than she hoped things would be for Eames. 

All of Eames’ life was adjusted for the pack needs. He worked hard twenty-seven days out of the month. He assured all jobs they took either fell just after the full moon, or were finished well before the next one. If timelines couldn’t be adjusted to avoid the day of the moon, and Mallorie’s days of recovery, then there was no job. Simple as that. 

It was easy for Eames, a man used to odd schedules, and if he was more than willing to be the one to turn jobs down, then he was glad to take that stress from Dom and Mall’s shoulders. Each moon it became easier to imagine this as his life, even as taking care of Mallorie became part of his job as well. Seeing the cuts and scrapes, the pain that her body endured as she recovered from the changes to her body. 

Soon he would be waiting there in her room come dawn, cradling her body as Dom lay her down on the bed. His arms wrapping around her, holding her frail seeming and pain wracked body long into the day. Murmuring softly to her, assuring her it would all be okay no matter how bad things got. Making sure she knew that she wasn’t alone, that she could handle this, that it would all be okay. Holding Mallorie as she slept, the rapid acceleration of her body bringing about a fully healed form by the time the sunset once more. Every scratch and cut gone, all of the bruises fading from dark and ugly to red and then yellow, and then back to the beautiful alabaster of her skin once more. 

For hours he would lay there, staring at the marks, watching as they slowly healed, dissolving and vanishing before his eyes. It was amazing, and beautiful, and it all showed him more of the strength that he well knew that Mallorie was capable of. Not only the shifting, which he had yet to see, but in healing from it. 

He knew she showed him this for a reason. It wasn’t just her desire to not be alone, to help Dom with dealing with it all that she brought Eames there. Certainly she told him it was so that Dominick didn’t have to handle her hurting and in pain, and he had seen the man’s pain over her wounds, but that was just the story she told him. It wasn’t the truth and Eames was quick enough to realize just what Mallorie was truly doing. She needed him to see it all. She needed him to know how bad it could get, how hard it would be. She had offered him this chance, and while Eames had agreed to it, he was quickly realizing why Mallorie was making him wait a year instead of doing it immediately. She needed him to see it all. How bad it was, how horrible it could be. He assumed that, eventually, he’d see the other side of it beyond the healing. Though that alone he found amazing and wonderous.

As a boy Eames had spent more time on the streets than he had in his family home. He had learned to fight before he knew how to ride a bike. Most of his youth had been spent with bumps and bruises, broken bones in his hands and black eyes. The idea of being able to take that kind of a hit and so long as he could handle the pain, he could be healed by the next day intrigued him. 

Even if he knew from things that Dom had whispered to him that healing the day after was not just about what a wolf had done during the night, but about what a toll becoming the wolf took on the body. What Eames saw on the outside was only a small part of the damage done, Dom whispered as he brought the Englishman a cup of tea late one day in the last moments before Mallorie was likely to wake up. Eames knew it was a warning, but the excitement of it all still outweighed that threat. Two days of pain a month to be able to heal, to have a strength that was beyond most people, and to be able to run with Mallorie, to race through the darkness with keen sight and smell that he’d keep beyond the form? Nothing he was seeing kept Eames from still wanting it.

So when Mallorie came to him twenty two days later, taking his hand as she curled down beside him on a sofa in a hotel lobby, Eames didn’t think much of it. She was a tacticle woman who embraced those she considered her own fully into her life. Not that there were many beyond her parents and her husband, but after nearly three years with them, and nine months since she had asked him if he wished to join her, Eames never doubted his place in her life or as part of her family. What did shock him was the kiss he received on his cheek and the whispered words.

“This weekend, Darling. The full moon. You will come with Dom when I shift and you will wait and be there when I return. Yes?”

Yes? As if he had a choice. Or a desire to do anything but agree with that question. He’s waited for this day for nine months. Waited while watching Mallorie hurt, and whimper, and seeing the tears in Dom’s eyes. He knows the hard parts, and he’s seen it first hand. He’s held her during the bad, and now he’s about to see the worst. She’s eased him into it, and it’s only going downhill from here before he can decide if the good outweighs the bad.

Lifting their joined hands, he kisses the back of her knuckles and smiles at her, all brightness and excitement. Thinking he is prepared.

And yet, he wasn’t. Not even close. There was nothing that could prepare him to watch this woman that was family now, who he could have loved in every way if he had allowed himself to, to watch her go through something that she had no choice but to endure every month, every full moon, for the rest of her life. He was not prepared at all to hear her cry out in anguish as suddenly her body jerked, bones snapping beneath the skin. Dominick had to hold him back with an arm around his neck, stronger mentally and emotionally than Eames was in that moment about his own wife as he kept the forger from rushing forward to try and help her.

Except there was nothing he could do. No way to help her even if Dominick would let him go, and eventually instead of struggling, Eames slumped and Dom’s hold loosened. Both arms wrapped around the broader man, holding him close as he watched the transformation take hold.

Bones in her face cracking, stretching, reforming into a long snout. Hair suddenly appearing along her perfect skin, thick and dense, and suddenly Eames was glad for the dark, glad to have the way it pushed out from her skin hidden from him. Wish he could avert his gaze to hide the rest of it, yet he knew that while he could physically turn away, close his eyes, looking anywhere but at the lupine form emerging from the woman he cared for, Eames knew that he wouldn’t. For her sake. For Dom’s. And because they were offering him something and he knew that he had to know all of it, see it all, know everything that he would be going through if he kept his word and endured what it is that Mallorie did every single month. Just as she was now.

After a moment the cracking stops, the wet ripping sound of tearing muscles and tendon becoming a soft whining sound. In the dark her form is nearly impossible to make out, the fur becoming one with the shadows as she lay there panting, recovering from the horror of the shift. Seeing the bruises let him know it was going to be bad, but the reality is so much worse than he had realized as she took a moment recovering. 

Was this worth the benefits? Was it worth it to be broken every moment and then put back together again? Twice. But then there is Mallorie. Mallorie who left her pack, and who deals with this every moment with just Dom. Dominick who loves her and cherishes her, but he doesn’t have to go through it and who has no idea what it is actually like except as one that loves her.

Eames straightened from where he was leaning against Dom, drawing a breath that rumbled in his chest and he exhaled with a sigh. Moving a step forward, then another. Dom hissed something under his breath but he didn’t stop Eames from pausing there, clearing his throat. The sound was like thunder in the silence. 

“Mallorie?”

He wasn’t sure how she might respond, or even if she would. Her head lifted though, the light gleaming off eyes as pale as gold and as rich as amber.

“This changes nothing,” he told her. “I still want to stay with you and be your pack.”

Nothing prepared you for how big a wolf is. Not television or the movies. Not until one is pressed to your legs, all muscle and fur and showing until Eames dropped to the ground and she could rest that massive skull against his shoulder.

She didn’t need words to share her relief with him. It was there in the soft whines and the way she stayed there like that for nearly an hour before racing away to enjoy her time before the pain came again. Both of them knowing that in a few short months he would be joining her for it all. The good and the bad. All of it. More than family and friends but pack.


End file.
